Alden Jones
Alden Jones is an award-winning author and educator, a Fulbright Specialist, and the editor of Edge of the World: An Anthology of Queer Travel Writing. Her most recent memoir is the Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Wanting Was a Wilderness, hailed as “a master class in memoir writing” by The Millions. Her previous books are the short story collection Unaccompanied Minors, winner of the New American Fiction Prize and a finalist for the Edmund White Award in Debut Fiction, and the travel memoir The Blind Masseuse, longlisted for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay. Her pedagogical expertise has been cited by such outlets as Teen Vogue, the Christian Science Monitor, and the Associated Press; her teaching awards include a Marion and Jasper Whiting Foundation Fellowship for travel to Cambodia and Vietnam. Alden is currently an Assistant Professor of Writing, Literature, and Publishing at Emerson College.
Her project, How Not to Write a Novel, is a hybrid critical-creative inquiry into the psychological and culture-bound conditions that determine the success or failure of long-form fiction, and an experimental narrative that tests the influence of the author’s lived experience on a text. Drawing on literary theory and analysis, cognitive psychology, Buddhist ethics, and practice-based research, the project analyzes common points of breakdown in contemporary novels, particularly in the domains of interiority and meaning-making within a particular cultural framework. By integrating close readings and experiments in genre with reflective examinations of her own creative process, How Not to Write a Novel argues that the novel functions as an ethical technology, and proposes a set of principles and interventions that support the composition of fiction that is architecturally sound, psychologically coherent, and attentive to the complexities of consciousness.